Before I start with my customary unrelated, yet somehow logical, opening anecdote, I’d like to throw you for a loop and instead, give you the following quote, which shall hopefully underscore the rest of the schlock that typically makes up 90 percent of what I write:

“Everyone, just…pretend to be normal.”

Every family has its quirks, some more than others. However, it seems every time I get into a conversation about my family’s particular quirks (obsession with mass emails, excellent cooking), the subject quickly degrades into a contest of “well, my family is weirder” one-upmanship. Reunions get discussed, anecdotes are swapped, and, sometimes – I kid you not – lawn ornaments are compared.

Of course, I usually win when I play my trump card: my family had a trio of plastic Christmas doom on our front porch last year: Santa Clause, along with a reindeer and a penguin adorned in scarf and hat.

While others would be, at best, horrified at such a brash lack of taste, I prefer to embrace it for what it is: absolutely certifiable. So my family is a little “abnormal.” Big deal. What’s the joy in being normal? Come to think of it, what is normal for a family, anyway?

“Little Miss Sunshine” is just such a film that tries to work out that question for itself, and ultimately fails, because it’s not really a question that can be answered. Does that make it a bad film?

There aren’t enough variations of the word “no” in the entire world to properly account for the answer to the above question. “Little Miss Sunshine” is, by far, one of the best films I’ve seen this year.

The Hoover family, seemingly hopeless at the onset of the film, is already unraveling at the seams thanks to a combination of unrealized ambition, bad luck, and their place in the absolute middle class of Albuquerque society. Frank (Steve Carell), Cheryl Hoover’s lonely, dysfunctional, Proust-scholar of a brother, manages to exacerbate the inter-familial tension when he fails at killing himself and is forced to move in with the family on doctor’s orders.

It’s gloomy, almost in a “Royal Tenenbaums” sort of way, but unlike Wes Anderson’s dark-yet-comic oddball showpiece, “Sunshine” offers one glimmer of hope that eventually becomes the guiding purpose for the family as a whole: Olive, the Hoover’s daughter. Olive dreams of winning the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant in far away California, and her youthful innocence and unflappable enthusiasm at the opportunity is what puts the whole family, father Richard, mother Cheryl, silent brother Dwayne, Number One Proust Scholar Uncle Frank, and Olive’s pageant coach, grandpa Edwin, into a Volkwagen Minibus and into the journey movie from hell, scored by (I kid you not) Sufjan Stevens.

Hijinks ensue, sexuality is questioned, and car horns are broken. In fact, if I may wax philosophic for just a moment, that Volkswagen is symbolic of the Hoovers as a whole. Yes, it works, and will do its job of getting them to their ultimate destination eventually, but it’s broken just enough to require everyone to push it to get it to go anywhere. Much as they’d hate to admit it, they need it – and each other – to help little Olive realize her dream.

I’d be hard put to find a better-cast movie than this. Each and every person realizes the value in unspoken reactions and in connecting with each other, as the 20-minute – was it really that long? – expository dinner scene at the beginning so effortlessly shows. On top of that, “Sunshine” is a movie that grasps the concept of humor in pain; much like a doctor who laughs at oddball cases at the end of the day, simply to keep from crying.

And laughter is something the viewer will be no stranger to in seeing “Sunshine.” If I wasn’t completely enraptured, I was doubled over from the pain of laughing.

I wish I could go on about all the little genius “bits” of “Little Miss Sunshine,” but I really don’t want to spoil any more of it than I have. It’s the type of movie that has to be seen multiple times (I’ve seen it twice as of this writing) just to catch everything. Perhaps it’ll be Carell’s pronunciation of “Nietzsche,” or another confused-yet-hilarious turn of Dwayne’s head. Regardless, this is the type of movie that is sure to withstand the test of time.

Four mopeds out of four.